THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17OH, NO, NOT A BOOKabout the pandemic
just a few months into Covid-19. Not an-
other series of snapshots overtaken by to-
morrow’s events. Fareed Zakaria, a CNN
host with a Ph.D. from Harvard, does not
fall into this trap.
Wisely, he stays away from the daily bat-
tles over masks and lockdowns. Nor is
doom-mongering his business. Instead
“Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World”
employs a wide lens, drawing on govern-
ance, economics and culture. Call it “ap-
plied history.” What insights does it offer
during a catastrophe that evokes the Span-
ish flu after World War I, which claimed 50
million — some reckon 100 million — lives?
That story comes with a word of caution
about historical analogies. Zakaria as-
cribes “seismic effects” to such cata-
clysms. Ancient Athens, a proud democra-
cy, never recovered from the plague. The
late-medieval Black Death all but wiped
out Europe with a toll between 75 million
and 200 million. Yet note that it was esti-
mated to have run for 100 years. The Span-
ish flu trickled away after two. As mortality
soared in the United States, the economy
dropped by only 3.5 percent. It took until
the 1930s before we could actually see a vi-
rus under the electron microscope. Today,
SARS-CoV-2 was sequenced almost in-
stantaneously.
The past, then, is like the Sphinx with
her ambiguous advice. Not only has sci-
ence learned a few things. So have govern-
ments, which went for penny-pinching and
deflation after the Crash of 1929, but now
pour out trillions.
Having laid out a “gloomy compendium
of threats,” Zakaria rightly celebrates “our
resilient world.” States actually “gain
strength through chaos and crises.” He
also dispatches the facile notion that
despots like China’s Xi Jinping do better
than democratic leaders. We owe the co-
ronavirus’s leap around the globe to Chi-
na’s suppression of lifesaving data; there-
after, the police state took over.
Khamenei’s Iran and Erdogan’s Turkey
performed badly, and so did Brazil, ruled
by a would-be caudillo.
The democracies did notsuccumb to au-
thoritarianism, but neither is there any
clear pattern. At least until recently Ger-
many, Denmark and Austria performed
best, Belgium, Sweden and the United
Kingdom worst. Taiwan and South Korea
quickly contained the virus without totali-
tarian tactics. The United States is so-so,
near the bottom of the Top 10 in deaths per
million. So, what are the lessons?
What matters is not the ideological col-
oration of government or its size, but its
quality,Zakaria says. He argues for “a
competent, well-functioning, trusted
state.” Sweden is all that, but also high up
on the League Table of Death. The United
States has proved neither competent nor
cohesive. It is an archipelago of some 2,
federal, state and local authorities charged
with health policy.
Yet federal Germany, with its ancient
history of decentralization, is also a hodge-
podge and still shines forth. The ur-model
of the strong state is France. In terms of
deaths per million, it ranks far above con-
federate Switzerland, with its 26 cantons
jealously holding off Berne.
So, what is good governance? An effi-
cient bureaucracy like Prussia’s, infused
with the spirit of freedom rooted in the
American Creed? Beyond your small-town
D.M.V., the United States seems to enjoy
neither. Social Security is superb, Veterans
Affairs a disaster. Meanwhile, officialdom
has grown exponentially in a supposedly
“anti-statist” country. America, Zakaria
says, must learn “not big or small, but good
government.” Amen to that — though not
forgetting Churchill’s quip that the United
States will eventually do the right thing af-
ter exhausting all the alternatives.Zakaria lays out the road from the pan-
demic to the transcendence of America the
Dysfunctional. The to-do list is long. Up-
ward mobility is down, inequality is up.
The universities of the United States lead
the global pack, but a B.A. at one of those
top schools comes with a price tag upward
of a quarter-million dollars. The country
boasts the best medical establishment, but
health care for the masses might just as
well dwell on the moon.
We should adopt the best practices of
northern Europe, Zakaria counsels. Like
Sweden long ago, Denmark is the new
Promised Land, even when compared with
the rest of Europe. Striking a wondrous
balance between efficiency, market eco-
nomics and equality, those great Danes
embody an inspiring model; alas, it is hard
to transfer. A small and homogeneous
country on the edge of world politics, Den-
mark is the very opposite of the United
States. Maybe its people should occupy
America for a couple of generations to re-
form 330 million über-diverse citizens.
The world’s troubles are not just Made in
U.S.A., Zakaria rightly notes. They are
rooted in ultramodernity: globalization,
automation, alienation, mass migration,
the lure and decay of the world’s sprawling
metropolises. These are the stuff of misery
— and the fare of cultural critics since the
dawn of the industrial age.
With his lively language and to-the-point
examples, Zakaria tells the story well,while resisting boilerplate as served up by
the left and the right. Nor does he spare his
own liberal class, the “meritocracy” of the
best educated and better off, which he fin-
gers ever so gently as deepening the divide
between urban and rural, elites and “de-
plorables.” He might have said a bit more
about the uses and abuses of cultural he-
gemony that have driven hoi polloi into the
arms of Donald Trump and triggered de-
fections from the democratic left in Eu-
rope.THE BOOK’S CENTRAL MESSAGEcomes in
the last paragraph: “This ugly pandemic
has... opened up a path to a new world.”
Which one? The gist of Zakaria’s program
is revealed by a recent editorial in The Fi-
nancial Times, which he quotes approv-
ingly. That newspaper was once a cheer-
leader of global capitalism. Now it argues
that “many rich societies” do not honor “a
social contract that benefits everyone.” So,
the neoliberalism of decades past must
yield to “radical reforms.” Governments
“will have to accept a more active role in
the economy. They must see public serv-
ices as investments.... Redistribution will
again be on the agenda; the privileges of
the... wealthy in question.” Now is the
time for “basic income and wealth taxes.”
Not bad for a supposedly capitalist
mouthpiece. Yet this should not come as a
surprise. Both The Financial Times and
Zakaria’s book urge a revolution already
upon us, and probably represent today’s
zeitgeist and reality. Free-market econom-
ics à la Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher have had a nice run since the
1980s. These days, Covid-19 is merely ac-
celerating the mental turn engendered by
the 2008 financial crisis. We are all social
democrats now.
Government in the West is back with in-
dustrial policy and trillions in cash. It is not
a radical, but a consensual project. Tax-
ation, a tool of redistribution, will rise
along with border walls. For the more per-
fect welfare state can flourish only in a
well-fenced world that brakes the influx of
competing people and products.
If that mends the miserable American
health, transportation and public educa-
tion system without cutting into the coun-
try’s dynamism, then more power to the
spendthrift. Still, “writing checks,” Zakaria
warns, sometimes “goes badly.” Especially
if it feeds consumption, not investment. Or
favors giga-corporations. After half a life-
time of retraction from the economy, big
government is back — and looks as if it will
stay. But beware of what you wish for.
Meanwhile, read “Ten Lessons.” It is an
intelligent, learned and judicious guide for
a world already in the making. May we all
be as smart as the Danes. They have mar-
velously combined welfarism and individ-
ual responsibility. But they have not in-
vented the PC, MRT, iPhone or Tesla, not to
speak of Post-its and the microwave pop-
corn bag. 0After the Pandemic
An argument that the United States must learn to practice good government.
By JOSEF JOFFE
TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC
WORLD
By Fareed Zakaria
307 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
JOHN KARELJOSEF JOFFEserves on the editorial council of
Die Zeit in Hamburg and as a fellow of Stan-
ford’s Hoover Institution.